Randa Abdel-Fattah

On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we'll take you from a forgotten Arctic archipelago.

The only place in the world with open borders.

To floating cities in the ocean.

Out in the middle of nowhere on your own.

To private startup nations that might be coming to some land near you.

Part 1.

A Weird World.

We're told all the time that you have a certain number of countries in the world, that they all have borders surrounding them, and that's kind of the architecture of the world, of the political world and of the geographic world.

But it turns out there's a lot more to it than that.

This is Atusa Araxia Abrahamian.

I'm the author of two books, The Cosmopolites, which is about the global market for citizenship, and The Hidden Globe, How Wealth Hacks the World.

Atusa has spent the last couple of decades traveling and studying the world with a skeptical eye, observing its hidden architecture, which she describes as a jumble of weird jurisdictions.

Lots of people will find themselves in a weird jurisdiction at some point in their life.

You might be at a border checkpoint.

You might be working in a factory that's in a special economic zone.

You might be on a ship that's flying a flag that you don't totally recognize.

Or you might find yourself sailing by a small, very frozen archipelago called Svalbard.

Svalbard is a northern territory of Norway in the Arctic Circle.

OK, let's be real.

You probably won't find yourself there anytime soon.